This podcast talks about love -- the concept of love and the felt experience of it. I talk about different aspects of love including parental love, love of family, and love of abstract ideals. Music by Simon Wester - 'Always Loved'.
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Note that Don Thompson is now available as a coach or mentor on an individual basis. To find out more, please go to his website www.nextpixprods.com, and use the 'contact' form to request additional information.
This podcast talks about love -- the concept of love and the felt experience of it. I talk about different aspects of love including parental love, love of family, and love of abstract ideals. Music by Simon Wester - 'Always Loved'.
PLEASE READ - Terms of Use: https://www.nextpixprods.com/terms-of-use.html
Note that Don Thompson is now available as a coach or mentor on an individual basis. To find out more, please go to his website www.nextpixprods.com, and use the 'contact' form to request additional information.
Speaker 1:
This is another random podcast thought for you today. Today, what I'd like to talk about is the concept of love. Now, love isn't really a concept, it's a felt experience. So let's talk a little bit first about the difference between the concept of love and then the reality of love, and then I'll segue into some other topics regarding love. But let's start there with the concept of love versus, or as opposed to, the reality of love as a felt experience. So, in my mind, the concept of love is fairly all-encompassing and has to do with thinking about love and what it means. So, to me, what love means is it means that you are more concerned about the other person that you love than you are about yourself. In other words, love will cause people to act in ways that may not be beneficial for themselves in order to help the person that they love. Typically, where love starts is in the relationship between the mother and the child, and this is where we move from concept to reality, because motherly love, nurturing love, is a very real thing and oftentimes wordless or nearly wordless, as the mother holds the child and perhaps breastfeeds the child, or perhaps just looks at the child and smiles at the child. My mother, I actually had seen a picture of her looking at me as a baby and she would hold me and be looking at me, and I sort of have a you might say remnant memory of this period where I would just see this smiling face looking at me.
Speaker 1:
My birth was rather different from many births, or some births, in that it was planned. And it was planned because my elder brother, the brother just older than me, had a twin and the twin had died. Both my elder brother and his brother's twin were suffering from congenital heart disease and while my other brother survived, at least for a while, his brother died at the age of roughly, I'd say, three and a half. My parents decided to have another child, in a sense, to replace him. His brother, my elder brother, the other twin who survived, lived until his mid-60s, but he eventually succumbed to the heart issues that he had as a child. My mother, when she would look at me as a result, I believe she was feeling rather grateful and rather hopeful that I was there and would be there for my older brother and would be, in essence, a positive presence in their lives, because I had come in as a result of my mother and father wanting to experience another child after the loss of a child. As a result, I feel like I have this attitude towards life, where I appreciate life. I feel like as if I have a purpose and I think that was probably instilled in me from my mother. You know, either Implicitly or explicitly, but most likely subliminally, that I had a purpose and that purpose was to, in essence, to ease their pain, you might say, from the death of my elder brother, my brother's twin. So that to me is love, the love that my mother had for me, the love that she had for her child that had died.
Speaker 1:
A mother's love is often a quiet love. It's a consistent love, it's a quiet love. It's sort of there in the background and in Quiet moments and expressed in quiet ways. The same thing can be said for a marriage. I've been married for quite a long time and, and oftentimes relationships will start off, you know, quite passionately and there's either, you know, one of two things happen either the passion evolves into something else or it stops. Sometimes Relationships don't exist beyond the initial passion of the relationship. So I wouldn't call the initial passion of a relationship necessarily love, even though there can be a lot of ecstasy and love and heartfelt emotions. What I would call love is is the commitment that comes out of that initial relationship, that commitment that becomes in essence again getting back to this notion that that love is consistent and it's quiet Oftentimes it's quiet.
Speaker 1:
It isn't really bombastic, it doesn't try to show itself off all the time. It doesn't need necessarily to be reinforced all the time. You can, of course, reinforce it by your actions. Of course that's the main thing. But you know, I've never felt like you know people need to tell each other they love them, their spouse or their significant other all the time. I I don't, um, criticize people who do that. I just don't feel like my spouse and I need to do that. We have an unstated Understanding that the love is there. We don't really need to express it with Consistent I love yous and that type of thing. Again, I'm not being critical of people. I understand that people enjoy doing that and like doing that, but for me and my spouse, we we don't tend to do that so much, um, but the love is still there. It's. It's quiet it's. It's consistent, it's persistent. So, um, again, to me these are some attributes of love.
Speaker 1:
It's it's not necessarily a a, you know, overly Stated thing necessarily. It can be quiet. It can be the consistency of getting up, uh, every morning, uh, you know, with your spouse, with your loved one, and having a cup of coffee and talking about what you're talking about and reviewing your what's going on during the day, and then you know recapping at night or whatever, and just having that concern. You know what is the other person thinking, what were they concerned about? What are their issues? Are they feeling okay? Are they doing okay? And, uh, you, you just want to. You know, from my perspective, keep tabs and keep in touch with the feelings and reality of the other person. You want to see, see outside of yourself, you want to look to, um, you know, outside yourself, for that love.
Speaker 1:
Love is a very heartfelt thing. I do believe that Perhaps some people don't ever evolve into love. They don't know really what love is. I don't necessarily think it's a universal Feeling felt by everyone, but if you do love you, it is in the heart. That was my Experience, or has been my experience with love. It's in the heart, it exudes from the heart. If you, if you don't feel love from the heart, you know you can develop it if you want to, and oftentimes Love might be considered to be a felt experience from the gut, but in my mind that that's not really Love. It's more attachment, it's more sort of a gut passion Not that that's a bad thing at all. That's oftentimes what motivates us to do things, and oftentimes love can be Associated with this kind of gut sense as well, you know. So I'm not saying that one precludes the other. They can often work in conjunction, but I would say that in particular for men oftentimes.
Speaker 1:
I believe that men do sometimes have a problem feeling from their heart and that this is a tragedy of many men, unfortunately, I have to say. This is my, my opinion. I don't know if this is quantified anywhere, but just an observing men in the world, I noticed that they do seem to work from their gut and they also seem to be rather insular in their notion of love. It's related to the family. It doesn't really look outside of the family. The family unit becomes the main recipient of their love, and to feel love for an abstract ideal or Other people in an abstract way sometimes doesn't work for a lot of people. They need to have something concrete To love in order to feel that they're, you know, really Expressing or feeling love. If they don't have something concrete, if they don't have a physical person they can look at, and hold and and touch and Say hello to, then they don't feel like that love is real.
Speaker 1:
But love can also, I believe, exist in a more abstract way. Of course. There's love of country, you might say there's, there's love of your fellow humanity, you might say, your fellow People that are journeying on a similar path to you, you might say, in your religion or your church and whatnot. So sometimes these, these abstract notions can be based on, on real things you know real people, of course but sometimes they can be abstract. And these abstract Emotions of love, I feel, while important, I would put them more, you know, in terms of a sort of a headspace type of love. It's more like a concept of love, your, your love, your love with the idea, for example, of the United States of America as this great thing. You're in love with the idea of a particular belief system that you happen to adhere to.
Speaker 1:
So again, I think it gets back to, in my view, a grounded sense of love and that that really Becomes the primary vehicle really for learning love in your life, I feel, is that you have these Relationships, oftentimes with your spouse or your children, or perhaps your close family, or perhaps your close associates, and, and through these quiet, sustained Kinds of commitments, you express love over the longer term. And this is what I found as I've gotten older is I feel like I've learned to love through these longer term Relationships. I've learned really the, the quietness of that love, the the consistency of that love, and to me that's a good thing, it's a great thing. I don't necessarily say you have to wait until you're older to have gone through it, even though life experiences, of course, can help. You can experience it at any point. You know a level of that kind of love, but I thought I'd mention it to give those folks that are younger so some hope that, in essence, the longer you're around, the more you learn about this thing called love.
Speaker 1:
I'll leave it at that and thanks for listening. As always. I look forward to talking to you again soon on the next podcast. Thanks a lot, bye-bye you.